Sportmanship

Sportsmanship is a characteristic that all sportsmen should have. From congratulating the other team, to simply biting your tongue are all parts of proper sportsmanship. It is a set of “unwritten” rules that keeps games fun, but also competitive.

A “good sport” is often what we call someone who abides by this set of “unwritten” rules. There two components that make-up being a “good sport". One is being a “good winner”, when you win you need to still respect others and not boast about your victory. The other component to being a “good sport” is being a “good loser”. I noticed that in many of my soccer games, if the losing team does not have a chance of coming back to win, the losing team changes their goal to trying to hurt opposing players for the remainder of the match. I too have thought f doing this many times, but never have I actually brought myself to actually hurting someone else on purpose. This has transferred to off the soccer field, where I still have not actually hurt someone on purpose.

Many concepts make up the greater word of sportsmanship. They’re fair play, character, and spirit. Fair play is the ability for each team to equally pursue success. A good sportsman would continue playing in a dignified manner even in the event that other participants are not. Character is the qualities of honesty, courage, and integrity. Honesty is important because if you cheat, you are cheating yourself in the process. Courage is used ability to rise against challenges, the bully at school, or the cheater in a game. Integrity is having these moral and ethical principles. Spirit is inspiring to us and pushes us towards our goals.

Poor sportsmanship not only makes the poor sport look bad, but it also makes feel bad. A situation where being a poor sport could lead to injury is if a soccer is saying obscenities to an opposing player, he makes himself a target. The opposing player could become very angry and hurt the poor sport in anyway, while also making a poor sport of himself too. In soccer many times the losing team tries to blame the loss on something other than themselves. They first blame it on each other which makes the entire team angry, and then someone brings up, “Oh it’s the referees fault, and he was terrible!” Which in most cases it was our failure to work together that made us lose. In American football, a team can get a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct, which in other sports like soccer, saying obscenities is a yellow card, which is a warning, and if you receive to yellow cards you get a red card and are forced to sit out for the remainder of the game and the next.

All of the stated above s what I feel sportsmanship is all about. No matter what you do in life, it will require you to play and act with good sportsmanship.

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